Summary of the AWS Service Event in the Sydney Region
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Summary of the AWS Service Event in the Sydney Region
1–10 of 41 posts
Re: Summary of the AWS Service Event in the Sydney Region
#2I knew that this was a big event when it happened last Sunday, because the AWS service status page had a yellow triangle rather than a green tick. Usually when they have an outage, they just put a tiny blue 'i' on the green tick...
Re: Summary of the AWS Service Event in the Sydney Region
#3Heh - I love the image in my head of the flywheel providing a few extra seconds of power to the coffee urn in the Blackwoods warehouse out the back and to all the fan heaters and big screen TVs in Toongabbie - just as Foxtel, Dominos, and Channel 9's Nagios dashboards all start turning red and their ops staff phones start beeping.
Re: Summary of the AWS Service Event in the Sydney Region
#4I love reading about problems like these, it's great that Amazon is forthcoming about them. There's always some new wrinkle.
E.g. in this case, in normal operation, power from the utility power grid spins a flywheel. When the grid fails, the flywheel provides a holdover until Amazon's diesel generators can start.
But in this failure the voltage from the grid sagged, rather than going away completely. The breaker isolating the flywheel from the grid didn't open quickly enough. So power from the flywheel was sent out to the grid. It didn't succeed in powering the grid for very long. Oops.
Re: Summary of the AWS Service Event in the Sydney Region
#5Why, oh why do they report times in PDT rather than AEST (the zone of the affected area) or UTC (the standard everything else is based on)?
(Mutter, mutter, … something about Americans and their timezones … and northern hemispherians and their seasons …)
Re: Summary of the AWS Service Event in the Sydney Region
#6I knew that this was a big event when it happened last Sunday, because the AWS service status page had a yellow triangle rather than a green tick. Usually when they have an outage, they just put a tiny blue 'i' on the green tick...
That's right, and you're even lucky to the (i) usually it's buried in the rss which is why https://twitter.com/aws_shd is useful.
Re: Summary of the AWS Service Event in the Sydney Region
#7I love reading about problems like these, it's great that Amazon is forthcoming about them. There's always some new wrinkle. E.g. in this case, in normal operation, power from the utility power grid spins a flywheel. When the grid fails, the flywheel provides a holdover until Amazon's diesel generators can start. But in this failure the voltage from the grid sagged, rather than going away completely. The breaker isol…
There's a reason why electrical engineering students are usually the smartest people at uni (I wasn't one of them but was often in awe).
Re: Summary of the AWS Service Event in the Sydney Region
#8There is something Orwellian about referring to this as a 'service event'.
I am reminded of 'The Event' from That Mitchell and Webb Look [0]. We don't talk about The Event.
Re: Summary of the AWS Service Event in the Sydney Region
#9Or, in summary, "Uninterruptable power supply is actually interrupted."
Re: Summary of the AWS Service Event in the Sydney Region
#10For those wondering what the "severe weather" was:
* http://www.smh.com.au/national/australias-wild-weather-sydne...
* http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-07/sydney-weather-storm-d...
* http://www.sbs.com.au/news/gallery/pictures-wild-weather-sav...